A Bronx man returning from a three-week Caribbean vacation was cuffed by police at JFK Airport and tossed in the clink for nearly a week before bumbling authorities realized they had the wrong man, a new lawsuit charges.

Wayne Richards, 43, was walking off an American Airlines flight from his native St. Croix in January 2003 when Port Authority cops accosted him and told him that he was wanted by authorities in Bergen County, N.J., according to the suit, filed earlier this month in Queens Supreme Court.

“I’ve never been in trouble,” Richards said he told the officers. “I’ve never been to Bergen County . . . It was something else. I just got out of vacation. To come back from the Virgin Islands and to wind up in this situation, it was really horrible.”

He said the cops showed him a photo of the Wayne Richards they were looking for – a man with dreadlocks and a scar on his arm.

“That’s supposed to be me?” asked Richards, who has never worn dreadlocks and has no such scar on his arm.

But Richards’ protests were to no avail. Because Richards’ Social Security number appeared to match that of the man the authorities were hunting, he was taken to the Port Authority police station in the airport, then shipped off to a filthy holding cell next to the Queens courthouse in Kew Gardens.

Then it was on to “the barge” – or the Vernon C. Bain Center – an 800-bed floating jail moored off The Bronx.

The terrified Richards lost weight and slept little during his six days there, he said.

Finally, Bergen County police arrived to take him to New Jersey, where he ostensibly was wanted on a warrant for jumping bail following an arrest for assaulting an officers.

Once there, authorities did the obvious – fingerprinted him – only to find that the original fugitive must have given them Richards’ name and Social Security number when they first arrested him. They drove him back to The Bronx with a curt apology, he said.

“This is a man that is totally innocent,” said his lawyer, Andrew Spinnell. “He doesn’t have a police record. This is terrible neglect.”

The suit does not specify damages, but Spinnell said he would seek $1 million from the defendants, the City of New York, the Bergen County Police Department and the Port Authority Police Department.